8 of 9It's hard to go wrong with a green 356. It's harder to go wrong when it's got a four-cam motor.

Photo by Davey G. Johnson

9 of 9The end came. Things had ended. It was the end. It looked something like this.

Photo by Davey G. Johnson

In my last missive from the California Mille, I mentioned that the hills of the Coast Range were exceptionally green for this time of year because of the late rainy season.

Said season made a reappearance for most of yesterday. It rarely bucketed, just mist and that irritating, spitting rain; the soak of a thousand drops. While some turned back--some with electrical gremlins, some perhaps a bit weak of spirit--a solid group of hearty souls motored onward from Calistoga toward Highway 1.

Just north of Fort Ross, an outpost established by Russian fur hunters, David Bowie's “Starman” popped up on the radio. Winding slowly past the old fort, maintained by the state as a historic park, I noticed the gates were closed.

State budget cutbacks; we can apparently only keep the place open on weekends.

Ahead of me was an Arnolt Bristol, brainchild of a man nicknamed “Wacky.” Featuring Bristol running gear and a body designed by Franco Scaglione at Bertone, its lines clearly inspired the 1968-82 Corvette. It also features an awkwardly high ride height, like a 1950s sports racer designed to run Paris-Dakar.

And here it was, puttering down Highway 1 toward Bodega Bay, one of the primary settings for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Exclaim “Tippi Hedren” three times fast. It's surprisingly fun.

The afternoon's meanderings back to the Solage resort in Calistoga were rather uneventful. The rain quit somewhere west of Petaluma and the cars seemed to spread out. The parking lot was full of transporters when we arrived. Richard Belveale's white Jaguar XK140 with the fender spats was already on its trailer. No surprise, given that the car seemed to be first nearly everywhere.

Before dinner, the famously opinionated and forthright Martin Swig apologized for last night's meal at the hotel, which apparently had been some sort of debacle, and suggested that we put it all behind us.

About five minutes later, a server dumped a tray of champagne flutes all over a couple, sending glass shards flying 15 or 20 feet, some landing on the table that I was sharing with the Swig family.

After the steam spouting from Martin's ears abated, talk turned to everything from bombing around 1970s Nevada in a pontoon-fendered Ferrari Testa Rossa to the purchase of a super-clean Datsun 510 by Martin's son David, during which Martin employed a walker to some measure of effect.

And then it was done. Some participants bugged out for home. Others planned to leave in the morning. The end of a rally is always tough. Over four days, there's a bond that forms between like-minded folks that's tough to explain, but it boils down to a shared experience, a “Oh, yeah, we did that together that one time” type of sense that remains a stronger memory than if one just got in a car and drove a thousand miles over four days by oneself.

The California Mille isn't quite a time warp, surrounded as we were each night with the trappings of 21st-century life; it's more a recontextualization of these glorious autos, a hundred-proof jigger of the past dumped into the present--especially since some of these cars in different hands would be relegated to museum, collection and concours duty.

Thanks to Swig and his crew, those cars came out to meet us. They straight-up blew our minds.